SEC basketball wheezing along

SEC basketball struggling for respect, as results drag down RPIs

Billy Donovan, coach of fourth-ranked Florida, says of the league's woes: "I don't think it's fair to say a league is bad until the whole thing plays out at the end of the year."
Phil Sandlin Associated Press

Florida's Billy Donovan, in his 17th season as the longest tenured men's basketball coach in the SEC, has built his two-time national championship program around a freewheeling offense.

But Donovan can play a little defense when public opinion is that SEC basketball, despite Kentucky's winning the national championship last year, is worse than ever.

"An opinion or an identity about a league gets formed on how it does in November and December, and I've never agreed with that," said Donovan, whose SEC-leading No. 4 ranked Gators (17-2, 7-0 in the SEC) host No. 16 Ole Miss (17-3, 6-1) on Saturday in Gainesville (6 p.m., ESPNU). "Teams get better as a season progresses. I don't think it's fair to say a league is bad until the whole thing plays out at the end of the year."

Donovan has seen the best and the worst the league has to offer through the years. But there's no denying facts after examining SEC nonconference schedules based on bracket expert Jerry Palm's midweek RPI ratings that rate 347 college teams:

The SEC's record this season against nonconference foes is 118-59 (66.6), the worst since the league started tracking it in 1991-92.

Thirty-nine percent of the victories (69 of 118) have been

against teams with an RPI of 200 or worse.

Apparently, SEC coaches have ignored league commissioner Mike Slive's advice from a couple of years ago to play a stronger nonconference schedule to build a stronger NCAA tournament at-large bid resume.

The SEC is 9-30 (30 percent) against top-50 teams (3-12 against the top 25). Even more disturbing is the league is a mediocre 24-16 (60 percent) against teams ranked No. 101 to 200 in RPI.

Against the major conferences — the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, Atlantic Coast and Big East — the SEC is 15-33.

And since the SEC has just three teams ranked in the top 40 of RPI (No. 5 Florida, No. 27 Missouri (which lost at No. 144 LSU on Wednesday) and No. 37 Ole Miss (which lost at home on Tuesday to No. 4 Kentucky), chances are that league play will not improve the SEC's odds of getting more than four teams in the NCAA tournament.

If that happens, it would be the fourth time in the last five seasons the SEC has had four or fewer teams make the NCAA tourney.

In the last 10 years, despite the league's winning three national titles, SEC teams have been eliminated 64 percent of the time (32 of 50) on the first weekend of the NCAA tournament.

There are several theories as to why SEC basketball has faded. They range from an influx of too many new head coaches, to blue-chip prospects in the South wanting to flee the football-dominated SEC for basketball-strong leagues like the Big Ten, the ACC and the Big East.

Just in the last four years, 10 new head coaches have been hired by the 14 SEC schools, including Missouri and Texas A&M, who hired new coaches in 2011-12 before joining the conference this season. Mississippi State (Rick Ray) and South Carolina (Frank Martin), the league teams with new coaches this season, are 2-5 each in conference play.

Other than Kentucky and Florida, no SEC team has consistently produced top-15 recruiting classes. The Wildcats and Gators have combined to have 19 of the SEC's last 30 players drafted by the NBA. At least one former Kentucky or Florida star has played in eight of the last 10 NBA Finals.

This season, it also hasn't helped the SEC that some teams have had their entire starting lineups from a year ago wiped out by graduation and/or NBA defections, such as Kentucky and Vanderbilt.

"When you don't have any returning players who played substantial minutes, it's tough, because you have no point of reference for the freshmen," said Kentucky coach John Calipari, who reloads every year with freshmen. "In the last couple of years, we had sophomores who could show freshmen how a drill is done."

Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings, after enjoying upperclassmen-dominated teams the last few years, said: "We've experienced what a lot of young teams experience. You take two steps forward and one or two steps back."

Florida fought through some early injuries and had the depth to do so. But now Ole Miss coach Andy Kennedy has to replace his top two reserves — freshman forward Anthony Jones (season-ending torn ACL) and senior guard Nick Williams (out indefinitely with a torn plantar fascia) — with 12 SEC games remaining. They were hurt during Tuesday's 87-74 loss to Kentucky.

For a team with a slim bench like the Rebels, that's almost 13 points gone.

"Depth is typically not a concern until you have to substitute," Kennedy cracked. "We've got to change a lot of things."

There's still a feeling that the league might rally by the end of the season, and things aren't as bad as they seem.

"Basketball in this league is better than it has been," said longtime SEC basketball observer Joe Dean Sr., former LSU athletic director and TV basketball analyst.

"But when you've won seven straight national championships in football, everything else has a tendency to pale a bit."